


Bloody Hands

by Star_Nymph



Series: To The Moon and Back [10]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Asperger Inquisitor, Asperger Syndrome, Character Death, F/M, Gore, Red Lyrium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-05 01:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14606076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Nymph/pseuds/Star_Nymph
Summary: She found him. Deep within Redcliffe's dungeons, she found him and covered her hands in his blood.





	Bloody Hands

**Author's Note:**

> This part of a bunch of short fics/drabbles I've kept on my tumblr and haven't put on here. Sorry if I'm spamming ya'll, it'll be over soon.
> 
> If you have any comments or helpful tips please feel free to write something. I’ll definitely appreciate the feedback! Thank you for reading!

It was before Leliana. Before Sera and Bull. In a lonely cold chamber where the blood of this Elder One’s victims puddled on the floor and their decaying meat hung from rusted chains, that’s where she found him. He had been hidden away as if he were some shameful secret, an old dressed riddled with holes and shoved to the back of a closet. Eurydice didn’t know what had made her set her eyes on the Iron Maiden in the corner. 

Maybe he called out to her.

Maybe she had seen his eyes between the slots of the grim mask.

Maybe she just knew.

Eurydice wretched the door of the Iron Maiden open and out rushed a wave of blood that splashed her front–and then Cullen collapsed from its embrace. They had stripped him of his mantle, his armor, his clothing, and made him into a shadow of himself. He had been so white and slender that when Eurydice instinctively reached out to catch him, she didn’t immediately register it as him. His body was littered with gaping black holes from where the spikes of the torture device had speared through him: through his neck, his chest, his arms, his legs, his hips, his wrists, his chest. All the blood had been drained from him, a pool at her feet, dripping down her legs, and her chest. That poor face of his; they had beaten him brutally, breaking his nose, and his eyes near swollen shut. 

He was unrecognizable. The only way she knew it was him was by his hair and even that had been ripped out in clumps, revealing a bloodied scalp underneath.

“Cullen…” She gasped as her legs gave out from beneath her and she stumbled back with him. Dorian rushed to catch her, keeping her on her feet as the body fell out of her arms and hit the floor with a thud. Cullen didn’t stir, didn’t speak a single word, and Eurydice couldn’t understand what she was feeling.

But she was suddenly cold as ice as she looked at her hands and saw that they were coated in his blood.

“That’s your Commander, isn’t it? Poor bastard…” She felt something squeezing her shoulders. Dorian’s hands. He’s nudging her, trying to get her away from Cullen but Eurydice didn’t budge. 

“Let go.” She told him, shrugging off his touch, and she was bending to her knees. Gently, she brushed a finger along his gaunt cheek, searching for the trick. This wasn’t real–they were in a future that shouldn’t exist, that when Dorian got them back, it wouldn’t matter.

This wouldn’t matter.

_it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it can’t be real_

don’t let it be real.

“Herald….he’s dead.”

 _Dead?_  Eurydice stabbed his cheek with her nail and turned his face so she could see his eyes. Always, she had looked away from them, as she did with everyone else. It hurt to look at them, to see them staring back, burning into her, judging her, expecting things of her. But when she saw that they didn’t move, that those amber eyes had lost its flame, then suddenly she wished she had been braver.

“Yes, he is dead.” Eurydice stood up and stepped back from the corpse–because that’s all it was right now.

A corpse.

A  _real_  corpse. 

Cullen was gone and she was so, so, so cold without him.

She felt Dorian peering at her, maybe mustering up something to say only to whisper that they should go instead. Eurydice followed after him without so much of a sound, staring at her hands which were still tainted with Cullen’s blood.

–

“I am…happy that  _you_ –that so many survived Haven.”

Out in the open of Skyhold, she had hazarded looking into those eyes again. It was uncomfortable, terrifying, it hurt for her to do it but she was relieved that he looked back and answered with a shy smile.

He couldn’t have known how much she meant that. She hadn’t told him of how she found him at Redcliff or that sometimes she woke up and his blood was still on her hands, black and red and cold as ice. 

He couldn’t have known that just hearing him say “As am I” brought the warmth back to her body and washed his blood away.


End file.
